


a light he was to no one but himself

by perfectlight



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 13:02:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/698543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectlight/pseuds/perfectlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU of The Girl Who Waited.  The Doctor is infected by Chem7.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a light he was to no one but himself

**Author's Note:**

> Chem7 is a fictional virus, and I wrote this on vacation, so though I’ve tried to lace a bit of science into the fic, there will probably/definitely be inaccuracies in the usage of some scientific terminology. 
> 
> This AU is also very much an AU, so while the Handbot details are all canon, I completely made up the symptoms of Chem7. Basically, I took the name and the one-dayness of it, and everything else is original. I also probably spelled Appalapachia wrong. Do forgive me.
> 
> Oh gosh, just - it's my first fic, please be kind. *hides behind keyboard*

_Amy, better one man than millions._

The pain doesn’t come in waves, it is a series of supernovae, rippling out from his failing hearts and shattering every nerve ending in every corner of his body, and it is not a beautiful, silent explosion of colors, but a series of screams tinged in red, red, red, with the taste of lime piercing it all. 

_A dying star is just as beautiful as a newborn one,_ he thinks, colors and light that stream across the cosmos, one meaning carnage, one meaning life.

… 

There were no sunsets or spires or soaring silver colonnades, only a door with two buttons.

“Have you seen my phone?” asks Amy, and the Doctor is pricked by frustration, humans, and their stupid bloody Internet, you want to update Twitter?

“On the counter by the DVDs,” he mutters, and Amy slides back into the TARDIS.

“Hang on a minute,” calls Rory, “no, I’ve got it, it’s in my pocket.”

Amy reappears with a frown on her face. “What’re you doing with my phone?”

“Mine was dead. I was calling the answerphone at home, checking messages.”

Amy takes her phone and Rory presses the green button, there’s the faint niggle in the back of the Doctor’s mind of a timeline shifting, it tastes slightly of lime but he ignores it, swallows and says, “Oh, so if it’s not Twitter, it’s the _answerphone_ , seeing as the number two planet in the top ten destinations for the discerning intergalactic traveler clearly isn’t interesting enough…”

The Doctor grumbles on as they pass into more white, a changed timeline, and a table with a glass that stares into nothing.

… 

_Kidneys are always the first to quit._

“I’ve had better, you know…”

But there’s no River, no extra lives, no kiss for him, not this time.

… 

“Do you know specifics on it? How does this virus operate, Doctor?”

Rory is ever the nurse, calm and professional, and the Doctor understands this, too, that Rory can’t think of the situation as his best friend and his wife’s Raggedy Man with only sixteen hours left to live, the Doctor is a patient and Chem7 is a virus to be treated and the Doctor is the resident expert. 

“It targets vital organs,” the Doctor says, and goes on to detail in an impressively detached manner that while his heart and lungs and kidneys slow down, partial paralysis of limbs will set in, followed by difficulty in processing sensory input, muscle spasms, distress of the nervous system and extreme pain coupled with simultaneous failure of both hearts resulting in death.

“God,” whispers Amy, as Rory starts wondering aloud about possible ways to delay symptoms, and he doesn’t know if she’s shocked or scared or sickened or if it’s all three and she’s praying.

… 

“T-tell River,” he babbles at one point when colors are stretching and bleeding and the TARDIS noise is making his head pound, his limbs are beginning to quiver and he’s scared because that means it’ll start hurting soon–

“Tell River, tell her–”

Amy’s hair shifts from red to purple to as blue as his box when it falls over her face, she leans down and smiles at him and whispers, “She knows.”

… 

“Will you be visiting long?”

White to match white and buttons to match the door, blank-faced with a waving hand and Amy frowns at the robot. “Why’s it got surgeon gloves on?”

“They aren’t _surgeon gloves,_ Amelia,” the Doctor waves his sonic at the robot, and continues, “they’re an organic interface: cybernetic visual relays with bioscanning capabilities – this thing literally sees with its hands. But why not just give it eyes?”

The robot sends its surgeon glove hand lurching forward with another “Will you be visiting long?” and Rory makes a strangled noise, scrambling away.

“Good question – bit sinister – what’s the answer to not get us killed?”

“Will you be visiting long?”

Amy bites her lip, white teeth on pink skin. “Er – what do we tell it, Doctor?”

“Look, Handbot,” begins the Doctor, twirling his sonic in his hands, “we’re just passing through, looking for some colonnades and possibly a sunset, we’re aliens, we don’t know!”

There is a beep and then, “Statement: rejected.”

Then things take a turn and the taste of lime grows bitterer and the robot says, “Appalapachia is under planetwide quarantine. This is a kindness facility for those infected with Chem7. This area has not been sterilized.”

The Doctor bursts backwards and pulls his coat up over his nose and mouth, the Ponds do the same though they have no idea what is going on and worry is prodding at the Doctor: _has not been sterilized, has not been sterilized–_

Amy’s voice is muffled from behind her hands. “Wh-what’s Chem7?” 

“A…a virus,” stammers the Doctor, “the one-day plague.”

“What – you get it for a day?” asks Rory hopefully, and the Doctor shakes his head from behind his coat collar.

“No. You get it – and then you _die_ in a day.”

He sees his Ponds’ eyes widen in unison and he flaps a hand at them, “No, no, you’re fine, Chem7 only affects two-hearted races like the Appalapachians and, er, me.”

The relief he expected to pass over their faces as they lower their hands is not there, only more fear. “Are _you_ okay, then?” screeches Amy.

“Good question.” Nervousness is coiling in his stomach, and the Doctor runs over the composition of Chem7 as he turns to the Handbot – airborn, highly contagious, can infiltrate a binary vascular system within five minutes, replicates at such a speed that within 201,600 double heartbeats it will have resulted in a cessation of all vital bodily functions–

The Handbot passes a glove jerkily before the Doctor. “You have been infected. Do you require the kindness of this facility?”

But the Doctor hasn’t heard a word, his hearts are thumping so loudly in his ears that he can barely hear Amy yelp and Rory begin to babble, all he can think of are the words that somehow seemed larger than the rest in the papers he’s read on Chem7 – no cure.

… 

It happens quickly. He is in the middle of a sentence and then he is gasping for air, legs sliding out from under him and boots screeching on the glass floor, the Ponds rush forward and grasp his arms, dragging him over to the console seat and he can hear Amy yelling, _Doctor, Doctor are you all right, can you hear me Doctor–_

He wants to say something, to comfort her, but he can barely even wheeze in a breath, his hearts twinge and he remembers from the Chem7 paper – slowing of vital body organs followed by partial paralysis of major limbs –

It’s starting.

… 

The Doctor thinks of another time when he got a twisted reward, when things were as unfair as they could possibly be, a time when there had been an old human that loved him by his side instead of two young humans that loved him, but this is not the kind of death he is used to, there will be no explosion of golden light, no rewriting of cells, no new Doctor, no new teeth, only pain and lime and death. The virus is too quick, even for a Time Lord, and–

“It’s not fair!” the Doctor finds himself yelling again, his fist is on the console and he thinks he might have thrown something, there is a twisting pain in one of his kidneys and he hates this. Death shouldn’t be in the middle like this, it should be sudden – over before it began, before he knew any difference – or slow, like the two hundred years the Teselecta thought he had. Lime snakes across his tongue again, it’s all so wrong and so unfair but he doesn’t know how to fix it and he doesn’t have enough _time_ to figure it out.

… 

“But there has to be something we can do,” argues Amy, as fiery as her hair, “we can rewrite the timelines somehow, just wipe the virus from the universe?”

“Amy, there isn’t–”

“Look, Doctor, we’re not going to let you die on us, okay?” says Rory. He shrugs, and the Doctor can see how hard Rory is trying to keep his good humor. “I mean, what else are we going to do on holidays if you’ve gone off and copped it from a virus, yeah?”

A smile quirks at the edge of the Doctor’s mouth, a faint tug that is lost in the taste of lime. This is wrong, all wrong, but he can’t tell how and there’s pain beginning to pulse in his chest. He clenches a fist and ignores it.

Rory has become Nurse Rory, asking if there are any viral catalysts that can be treated, anything to slow the virus down or stop it all together, and the Doctor keeps shaking his head and saying no, no, no, no, and finally Amy seems to go half wild, whirls around and glares at him, grips the lapels of his coat.

“You can’t. Die. Raggedy Man,” she interrupts, her pond-green eyes as hard as rocks. “You can’t. We won’t let you.”

The Doctor wets his lips, his hearts thumping funnily at the can’t and let you and the thought that here are people who love him, he’s found people that love him again and now he has to leave them.

“Amy, even if we eradicated the virus, there would have to be some sort of plague that drove the Appalapachians to build the kindness facility. We can’t erase the quarantine facility,” he retorts as he sees Amy flare up, “it’d cause a paradox, we can’t erase what set us on the erasing in the first place. There would have to be a virus that affected those beings, and they have advanced systems like me, not much can make them ill. If it got them, Amy, it’d get me. Even if it wasn’t Chem-7…” He swallows and feels that he is digging his own grave and these words are the shovel. “It would be something.”

“Then – then rewrite the virus,” and Amy is growing desperate now, “do something Time Lord-y to it so it doesn’t effect a binary vehicular system or whatever it is that you have–”

He grows stiller and colder than an icicle weighing down the branch of a tree. “Amy. You want me – to create a virus – that will kill millions of people? That will quarantine a planet? That will–”

Those rocklike eyes begin to glisten, and she leans away. “No – I didn’t mean that, Doctor, I just–”

The Doctor grinds his face in his hand and he understands, he truly does, because this would be him, with the ferocity and the desperation, if it was his sweet little Amelia with a day left to live. It would be him, tearing apart time and overturning planets, but the words destroyer of worlds are echoing in the Doctor’s mind so he can’t tell her so, not just yet.

“Amy, better one man than millions.”

… 

That was how it had been, during the Moment. Better one planet burned. Better one species, one home, one war, than the destruction it would cause for the Time Lords to have risen. 

Better, better, better, better–

The words had coiled around his shattering hearts and through his mind as Gallifrey burned.

… 

At one point while the Doctor’s limbs are limp, Rory is asleep on the console chair and the Doctor is lying on a cot that the Ponds wheeled in from the TARDIS med bay, Amy is leaning on the barrier and watching the sensors and wavering lines on the scanner. Hearts, lungs, brainwaves, blood pressure, temperature. 

“So,” the Doctor says weakly, his eyes sliding over to Amy’s blank face, “how am I?”

Amy manages a half smile. “Guess I’m playing doctor now, aren’t I?” She rattles off the numbers and percentages on the scanner, the Doctor pretends it isn’t as bad as it is, and Amy pretends to believe him.

“I still can’t believe…” murmurs Amy, probably not intending for the Doctor to hear, but his eyes shoot towards hers so she sighs and finishes: “I can’t believe any of this is happening.” Then her face grows stern and she shakes a finger at him. “You’re not allowed any more paradise planets, you understand? Planet of the coffee shops next time and _don’t_ go on about how tedious it is.”

The Doctor can’t help but grin. “Amelia Pond,” he chuckles, coughing a little but wheezing the words out anyway: “Amelia Pond, you are a singular being.”

…

“How long?” asks Amy hollowly when they’ve finally come back into the TARDIS after scrounging Appalapachia’s archives for anything related to a Chem7 cure, piloted away from white and into the safe hum of the Time Vortex. 

The Doctor stares at the time rotor as it sinks up and down. “Twenty hours. At best.”

The Doctor’s fingers hesitate, floating over the typewriter before settling down to type in coordinates. Then he pulls a lever and the TARDIS towards its destination.

“Wait – where are we going?” says Rory, scrambling up to the console with Amy to check the scanner, they read the coordinates and Amy practically snarls as they turn towards the Doctor.

“Home,” she scoffs, “you actually think you can send us home? You think we’re just going to go?” She scowls at him as if to say, _could you be more ridiculous, Raggedy Man?_

The Doctor groans and thumps his forehead against the time rotor, he doesn’t want to fight about this, not now while all he can focus on is the fact that his heartbeats are growing irregular–

“We’re staying with you,” Rory says, flat-out as if there is no argument to it, there is a shadow of a centurion in his firm tone. The constant warrior stays constant whether outside a box or in one, utterly human or not quite human at all. “We’re not going to leave you here to die.”

It’s growing difficult to stand upright, but the Doctor doesn’t want to show it, instead leans all his weight on the console and hopes it isn’t obvious. “I-it’s going to get…harder,” he tells them carefully, trying trying trying not to see the tears pooling in Amy’s eyes. “I told you, it…it’ll start hurting me. The virus. I’ve only got twenty hours, and I’ll…go out with a bang.”

Amy makes an awful smothered squawk, it sounds like she’s forcing back a wail and it hurts the Doctor more than any failing kidneys could.

“I don’t want you to have to see that,” he argues, but he’s lost before he’s begun because Rory’s face has turned harder than stone and Amy is glaring at him with a fire that surpasses red giants and Rivers and boiling suns and he knows he has no chance, that the Ponds who waited will wait with him until the end, and the last thing he’ll know is that he’s hurt them in every way possible.

… 

“Not long.” The words are distant and twisted, they echo in the Doctor’s skull, first a child’s voice and then the Handbot’s and then Rory’s, there is a sob as they are uttered and it might have been Amy’s.

Her face is closest, her deep eyes glimmering, light reflecting from the tears like tiny stars. Everything bulges and stretches around him until the flickering, refracting lights are stars within a wavering nebula like so many that he has seen before, a birthplace of stars in the eyes of Amy Pond.

It makes him glad, somehow. He is dying, but there are still stars left for him.

“A-melia…Pond…” the Doctor chokes out, pain cuts through his hearts and death is coming again but here she is, just as her little self was when it was a kiss instead of a plague that was killing him.

His hand comes up and brushes Amy’s cheek, colors are wavering and flashing and suddenly there is Rory, saying something about bradycardia. 

Bradycardia: abnormally slow heart action – extreme pain coupled with simultaneous failure of both hearts resulting in death–

Suddenly there is no sound and only his Ponds in twisted color, in a world perforated by the taste of lime.

Then the pain comes.

… 

_A dying star is just as beautiful as a newborn one,_ he thinks.

… 

But a dead star brings life anyway, it can’t help it, it dies in a flare of brilliance and spews every particle of what it was throughout the universe, fragments of stardust clumping and gathering, growing heavier, gravity and time pulling what was a sun into a star or a moon or an entire new world, death unto life and life unto death, an endless circle of everything that can’t help but exist and the Doctor has seen every curve of it–

Death unto life, stars unto stars, hearts unto hearts, Ponds unto Rivers…

And then there is nothingness.


End file.
